Friable Messes

Had an industrial reporter of the already venerable Cincinnati Gazette covered the Grasselli Chemical Co.'s formal opening in 1839, he might have learned that Founder Eugene Grasselli's family had been chemists for 400 years, since first they made gunpowder and perfume in Torno, Italy. He could not have learned, however, that the company would move to Cleveland after the Civil War. and would there prosper mightily producing fertilizers, zinc metal, zinc dust, explosives, aspirin, until finally, under Grandson Thomas Saxton Grasselli, it would have 22 factories and assets of $56,700,000.

Nor when Thomas Jefferson said on the death of his immigrant friend Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours in 1817, "No man ever labored more zealously or honestly ... he has left abundant monuments," could he have suspected that one of the monuments would be valued no years later at $308,000,000. For in 1802 son Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours began concocting friable messes of gunpowder in a squat stone house on Brandywine Creek, Delaware. Son Eleuthere Irenee had learnt his chemistry from Lavoisier.* clarified, refined, improved his formulae, passed them through to great-great-grandson Lammot du Pont, eighth president of the company.

It was reasonable, then, that du Pont and Grasselli should recognize each other's traditions, experience, should propose to Grasselli's stockholders a consolidation. Neither company will lose its identity, for du Pont contracts to continue Grasselli production of heavy chemicals under Grasselli's name.

* Chief French antiphlogistonist